Eye movements reveal person characteristics

Abstract: Eye movements reveal important information about where people look and the patterns of these eye-movements are guided by the visual salience of objects around us (how much they “stand out” from their surroundings), our previous experience, dynamic cognitive processes linked to the task at hand (whether we’re searching for a particular object, for example) and whether social factors (other people) are present or not. Therefore by measuring eye movements , we can gain access to an exceptionally rich source of information: a high-resolution spatiotemporal record of the cognitive and visual processes that guide our behaviour. In a first set of experiments we recorded eye movements from children while they watched movies to evaluate different standard models of gaze allocation and compare performance across age groups. We find greater variance in eye movements within younger children than older children and adults. We also find that a model based on looking at faces performs as well as saliency models across all age groups. In a second set of experiments, we examined how eye movements may reveal important information between people when they look at each other. We recorded people’s eye movements in two different experiments: (1) while they made eye contact with an actor on a screen (akin to a Skype scenario) and (2) while they engaged in “forced” periods of eye contact with another person in real life. In both conditions we found that participants’ eye movements revealed important information about the viewers. Taken together these experiments highlight the richness of eye movements, and how these can reveal important information about a person.